AbiWord's primary purpose is to be easiest way possible to prepare documents. We're very tightly focused on being as easy to use as possible. I'm particularly proud of our Visual Drag and Drop feature which substantially reduces a users need to use the clipboard.

However about 3 years ago I thought about the possibilities of utilizing all the neat features of AbiWord remotely. While AbiWord has an extensive array of command-line options, and many people found these useful, each use of Abiword from the command line required reloading Abiword into memory, which was highly inefficient. So I came up the idea of command line interface to AbiWord.

This is a plugin, ("AbiCommand"), which is invoked with the command-line

abiword --plugin AbiCommand

The "--plugin" means execute following the plugin immediately.

This gives you control of the program without actually having a graphics window open.
AbiCommand provides a command line interface into AbiWord which allows all sorts of interesting things. You can load and save documents. You can find and replace text. Insert text, delete text etc.

I thought this was a great idea but nobody seemed to be using it much. It was one of those "secret tips" computer magazines like to tell their readers about. Except nobody seemed to know about it.

Then after the release of Abiword-2.4 we began to get more and more bug reports and Requests For Enhancements for AbiCommand. It appears that some people have realized how useful this is for document conversion. AbiWord-2.4.2 (due Real Soon Now) has very good support for export to odt format (Thanks Nokia!), which joins our great support for export to HTML,RTF and ABW. We also had a report that showed how easy this was to utilize with PHP..